Problem
People who want to gain professional skills don’t have many options besides obtaining them from their jobs while people who have passion projects have trouble recruiting talent for them.
Solution
We designed a platform that allowed people to post project listings for people to apply to. A structured setting also ensured people could easily manage their projects and work.
My role
Aside from being the project manager, I focused on user research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing to design the native mobile app from a holistic perspective.
As the project manager, I had to keep everyone on track. I used tools such as Google Drive, Evernote, and Gantt chart software to keep the project on schedule.
Understanding the problem
We wanted to fully understand our users and the problems they faced, so we started with competitive research on existing products and services. Next we moved to user research, sending out screener surveys and conducting in-person interviews to understand how users behaved.
Affinity Mapping
We took this user research and extracted key points, clustering them in an affinity map to see common trends and themes. This helped us clarify the problem and decide how to proceed.
Findings
From our user interviews we identified several patterns. Five out of seven users mentioned learning best while applying skills, particularly in group projects. Four out of seven also mentioned that a sense of community was helpful to learning.
Personas & Journey mapping
To keep the user at the forefront, we created personas for our two primary user types and also created a journey map to understand users’ emotional journeys as they used our app via the various touch points.
Content mapping & object-oriented UX
Before wireframing, we mapped our app’s content onto screens to plan out our design. This is object-oriented UX, a design method that brings object-oriented programming into design by designing ‘objects’ -- bundles of information, content, and functionality -- streamlining the process of translating design into code.
I quickly constructed this app map / flow to help my team visualize how the app would function. In addition, it helped us visualize what content was on which page so that we could agree what content would be on each page before we designed the actual user interface.
Prototyping, testing & iterating
Using our medium fidelity wireframes to prototype in InVision, we conducted usability tests with users, iterating to make various UI and functionality changes. We repeated this process with high fidelity mockups and finalized the screens when the kinks were worked out.
Site map & app flow
Because our app contained numerous screens and states that depended on conditional programming logic, it was important to understand the information architecture. We created a final site map and app flow hybrid diagram as a design communication deliverable.
The finalized app flow / map. This included all of our screens as well as the conditional logic that determined the screen states.
